What Would Jeb Do?

An ex-front-runner looks to his brother’s advisers.

“He’s gotta convince people that three Bushes are not one too many,” one rival says.

Illustration by André Carrilho

On Friday, October 2nd, Jeb Bush was onstage at a college auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, for a public interview with Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general and a prominent figure in the right-wing firmament. Bush is sixty-two, but, thanks to a low-carb Paleo diet, he looks younger than he did when he left the Florida governor’s office eight years ago for a life in the business world. A trim physique, however, hasn’t boosted his appeal to potential voters. A new national poll showed that Bush’s support had sunk to four per cent; South Carolina, which has one of the most conservative Republican electorates in the country, and will hold its primary early next year, just after Iowa and New Hampshire, is crucial to winning the nomination. Once considered the front-runner, Bush is trailing a clutch of candidates, among them Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who have never held public office and encourage comparison to buffoons.

Jeb has presented himself as the most electable Republican candidate: willing to break with Republican orthodoxy on domestic issues such as immigration and education, and committed to breaking, if vaguely, with his brother’s legacy on foreign policy and to being, as he has said, his “own man.” Before Bush officially entered the 2016 campaign, he remarked to a group of C.E.O.s at a conference in Washington, D.C., that a successful candidate had to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general,” and should campaign “without violating your principles.” He meant that one must avoid the perennial trap of party primaries, in which “base voters,” the hard-core conservatives, force politicians to take extreme positions that will prove unpopular in a general election and, when later disavowed, expose the candidate as a phony. “It’s not an easy task, to be honest with you,” he noted. (Hillary Clinton faces a similar problem in her race for the Democratic nomination.)

But in his conversation with Wilson, and in a subsequent interview with me and other reporters, Bush veered toward the right. On domestic affairs, his view was neatly summarized by his answer to a question about gun control. It was the day after the mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, and yet Bush rejected any calls for new legislation. He noted that he had confronted similar pressure for government action after tragedies while he was governor: “Look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis, and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”

Bush was pilloried by Democrats for his “stuff happens” remark, but he defended it, telling me that the government doesn’t have a solution to every problem, and that sometimes government action makes matters worse. Some variety of a laissez-faire philosophy is standard for modern Republicans, at least on most domestic issues. But, increasingly in recent months, Bush, like a number of his colleagues, has been making the case for aggressive intervention abroad. Two days earlier, Russia had carried out its first air strikes in Syria. When I asked Bush how he would respond if he were President, he said that it was the lack of American action that had created the dire situation in Iraq and Syria, and invited the Russian military to bolster the Assad regime.

“I think we need to stand up to Putin, not just as it relates to Syria,” Bush told me. “This sends a signal all around the world of the United States pulling back, not being serious. Our allies don’t believe that we’re going to have their back. And this emboldens our enemies.” Bush offered no details on how to “stand up to Putin” or what, exactly, he would do to pacify the killing floor of the Middle East and South Asia and reconcile the tangled rivalries and interests there. But his message to the base was clear: We must do something. And we must do it now.

Bush’s view represents a return to a simplistic interventionism that seemed discredited in the wake of the Iraq debacle. For decades, the G.O.P. has been split into two camps. The realists, who dominated the Presidency of Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, emphasized diplomacy and coalitions over go-it-alone displays of force, and a skepticism about America’s ability to shape the internal dynamics of foreign countries. They also expressed a willingness to tolerate tyrannical regimes that advance U.S. interests or create greater stability in volatile regions of the world. The other camp—variously described as idealists, hawks, and neoconservatives—dominated the Presidency of Bush’s brother. They have more often called for the overthrow rather than the containment of hostile regimes, and they remain committed to exporting American-style democracy to places where it has never flourished.

The hyper-interventionist foreign policy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was widely blamed for the Republican Party’s loss of Congress in 2006 and of the Presidency in 2008. But many hawks, once more in full voice, now believe that the Obama years—the emergence of ISIS, the crisis in Syria and Iraq, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the rise of Putin at a time of Russian isolation and economic weakness—have vindicated Bush. “Any Presidential candidate, the first thing he or she needs to do is put up a map of the Middle East in 2009 and one today,” John McCain, a leading hawk in the Senate, told me, as we discussed foreign policy in his office. “And point out that it is this President’s failures. He said he got out of conflicts. He got out of conflicts, but the conflicts didn’t end.”

Obama thinks that intractable foreign-policy crises should be guided by the physician’s maxim of “first, do no harm”—or, as his aides have said privately, “Don’t do stupid shit.” To Republican hawks, this sounds like a willful and dangerous abdication of American power and influence. Lindsey Graham, who is one of the long-shot Presidential candidates and McCain’s closest ally in the Senate, has called for ten thousand American troops to be sent back to Iraq. Last week, Chris Christie said that he would set up a no-fly zone in the Syrian airspace in which the Russians are now operating, and shoot down any planes that entered it.

But of all the Republican candidates vying to reform the world of foreign affairs only one belongs to a family of Presidents that, for better or worse, did so much to give that world its present shape. When Jeb Bush began his campaign, he enlisted as advisers some of the realists from his father’s camp, including the former Secretary of State James Baker. But the heaviest contingent consisted of his brother’s liege men: Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who made the ideological case for invading Iraq; John Hannah, who had been an adviser to Dick Cheney and pushed bad intelligence into Colin Powell’s famous speech at the U.N. making the case for war; Porter Goss, the former C.I.A. director who condoned waterboarding as an interrogation technique; and Stephen Hadley, the former national-security adviser, who took the blame for false assertions that President Bush made about nuclear yellowcake allegedly sought by Saddam Hussein from Niger.

Another adviser on his team is Otto Reich, who served in various foreign-policy roles in the Reagan Administration and in both Bush Administrations, and is perhaps best known for his participation in the 2002 attempted coup against Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of Venezuela. (Reich denies that he or the U.S. played any role in the coup.) In May, Jeb Bush, after providing a series of confusing responses on the issue, said that, given what is now known about the condition of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear-, biological-, and chemical-weapons program in 2003, he would not have invaded Iraq. Not all of his advisers share this sentiment.

“I can defend the invasion of Iraq,” Reich told me. “What did the invasion of Iraq do? It caused all of the people who would’ve otherwise come and attacked us and killed Americans on our soil—it caused them to go to Iraq and die there. That may sound very brutal, or whatever, but we have seen what has happened when you have an Administration like the current one, that did not realize what Bush had done; sent the troops home from Iraq; created a vacuum that was filled by ISIS. And they’re killing Americans and everyone else—they’re mostly killing Muslims. I lay that at the feet of the Obama Administration.”

He added, “All Republicans say what I just did . . . but it’s not reported. Nobody listens. It goes against conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is that Bush was a failure in foreign policy, because of Iraq. Well, history is beginning to tell a different story.”

The American public’s appetite for military interventions runs in cycles. After the triumph of the Second World War, policymakers were emboldened to roll back Communism, but the miasma of Vietnam instilled a wariness of major overseas military entanglements that spanned the Carter and Reagan Presidencies. In 1991, the relatively quick and successful Gulf War sparked a new bipartisan consensus that American force could again be deployed wisely if it was undertaken with overwhelming strength and with the benefit of an international coalition. The lack of intervention in Rwanda was widely seen as a moral calamity for which politicians, including Bill Clinton, have apologized.

That uneasy consensus lasted through the 2001 toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the invasion of Iraq in 2003 came to be seen as such a catastrophic mistake that even its progenitor could not avoid casting blame on his own circle. George W. Bush, during his last two years in office, forced out Donald Rumsfeld and marginalized Dick Cheney. It was too late to save his own popularity. When voters went to the polls in November, 2008, Bush’s job-approval rating dipped to twenty per cent, the lowest of any outgoing President in the history of polling.

Voices of restraint can still be heard in the Party’s debates, including on Jeb Bush’s team. One adviser, in contrast to Reich, told me, “I’m sure he’s not going to invade Iraq again. We did that one. You can’t compare him to his brother, because his brother was operating in a different environment. We had just been attacked; we didn’t know what was coming next.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, whose candidacy is essentially limited to a hard-line foreign policy, said his opponents were trying to sort out the politics of interventionism. “Here’s the problem,” he said, “Republicans know it’s not popular to be for Obama’s foreign policy, but they’re nervous about how far to go. They’re trying to find out where the public is, and trying to take the public’s pulse. They’re trying to figure out where the market is—where’s the sweet spot?”

Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, who is also running for President, told me that he thinks he’s found it: a foreign policy that channels Reagan, by far the most popular Republican in modern history. In Cruz’s Senate office, we sat under an enormous painting depicting Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, in which he declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Cruz is forty-four, eighteen years younger than Jeb Bush. Other politicians of his generation, including Marco Rubio, also forty-four, were strongly influenced by 9/11, but Cruz told me that he draws more lessons from Reagan’s fight against Communism than from Bush’s and Obama’s fight against terrorism. “The foreign-policy events that shaped my world view the most did not occur in the past two Presidencies,” he said. “I believe in peace through strength. It’s worth underscoring. Reagan went through eight years in the Presidency, and the biggest country he ever invaded was Grenada.”

He emphasized that “among Republicans there is a spectrum of views of foreign policy. At one end, there is Rand Paul”—a non-interventionist who is the most skeptical of further involvement in Syria and Iraq. “At the other end, I would put John McCain. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio are very similar to McCain. I would describe my views as a third point on the triangle.” He believes that “America should always be a clarion voice of liberty, and that the bully pulpit of the Presidency has enormous power. There is power to speaking the truth on a global stage.” He added, “However, speaking for freedom is not the same thing as using U.S. military force. Historically, America has always been reluctant to engage in military force.”

Reagan’s foreign policy was rhetorically idealistic but also deeply pragmatic. Although he described the Soviet Union as “the evil empire,” he was quick to negotiate with Gorbachev. Soon after Hezbollah attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, killing two hundred and forty-one Americans, Reagan said that a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Lebanon would send a “signal to terrorists everywhere: they can gain by waging war against innocent people.” But then he did it anyway, after concluding that the troops’ mission was unclear and that their presence offered too inviting a target to extremists.

This strain of pragmatism was powerful enough that George W. Bush called for a “humble” foreign policy in his 2000 campaign, and condemned the kinds of democracy-building interventions for which he would later become known. Cruz strives to return the G.O.P. to its pre-9/11 philosophy. “If and when U.S. military force is required,” he told me, “it should, No. 1, always be to directly further the vital national security of the United States. No. 2, we should use overwhelming force. And, No. 3, we should get the heck out. It should not be the objective of our armed forces to engage in nation-building, to transform foreign nations into robust, utopian democracies.”

While many Republicans now criticize Obama for not doing enough in Syria, Cruz was among those who opposed Obama’s 2013 request to strike Syria. “He repeatedly tried to justify this as ‘vindicating international norms,’ or as ‘the violation of international law,’ ” Cruz said. “It’s not the job of our military to behave like a law professor in a faculty lounge, vindicating international law. It’s the job of our military to protect the safety and security of three hundred and thirty million Americans.” He said that although “Assad is a monster” who “has used poison gas” and “killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens,” he worries about what might happen “if the attack succeeds and you topple Assad, and the weapons then fall into the hands of Al Qaeda or Al Nusra or ISIS or any of the other radical Islamic terrorists.” (Donald Trump has said that he’s happy to have Russia in Syria fighting ISIS, though he failed to note that, so far, Russia has been mainly targeting U.S.-trained rebels, not ISIS.)

Cruz added that the military commanders he has consulted insist that “the most potent tool to use against ISIS is overwhelming airpower.” He maintained that arming the Kurds in northern Iraq was a better alternative to sending U.S. troops. “We need boots on the ground, but they don’t necessarily need to be American boots,” he said. “The Kurds are our boots on the ground.”

But Cruz’s prescription may be more like Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts than like Reagan’s foreign policy: it promises enormous benefits with very little sacrifice. Graham, who wants American troops to lead the fight, scoffed at Cruz’s argument. “The Kurds don’t have any offensive capability,” he said, pointing out that Shiites and non-Kurdish Sunnis in Iraq and Syria would be as concerned about Kurdish advances as they are about ISIS. “They’re not gonna go down to Ramadi! Go ask the Kurds, ‘Would you help us liberate Syria?’ And they’d say, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’ If you want to create a war to end all wars, have a marauding band of Kurds going through the Middle East.”

Cruz has calculated that, despite the rise of ISIS, Republican voters are still hungover from the costly interventions of the Bush years, and that they share his skepticism about the ability of American troops to accomplish much in Iraq and Syria. “There are some politicians in Washington who approach foreign military action as if they’re playing Risk,” he said. “They want to deploy troops and command them in battle.” He added, “A number of politicians treat American boots on the ground as a talisman to demonstrate that they’re really tough.”

Obama, who has said that he was elected to end wars, not start them, has bombed more countries than George W. Bush did. But in fighting terrorism he has chosen to use drones and other forms of airpower, Special Forces, and proxy armies. Obama was skeptical about intervening to stop Muammar Qaddafi’s forces as they marched on a helpless population in Benghazi, Libya. He had to be talked into the operation by, among others, Hillary Clinton, and the result—a failed state in Libya that has created a haven for terrorists—shaped his skepticism about intervening in Syria.

Early on, key Republicans seemed to endorse Obama’s cautious approach. When Marco Rubio ran for the Senate in 2010, he supported Obama’s drawdown of troops in Iraq. As a former city commissioner in West Miami and then a state legislator, Rubio knew the foreign-policy issues that important Florida constituencies care about, such as the Jewish community’s staunchly pro-Israel views and the Cuban-American community’s fierce opposition to Castro. He had little experience with broader foreign-policy questions. In his early months in Congress, he supported attempts at diplomacy with Iran. During the 2013 fight over budget cuts, Rubio advocated for government-spending reform. He has since grown less cautionary, arguing for an increase in military spending and calling it the “most important obligation of the federal government.”

Rubio, who was a leader in the Florida House while Jeb Bush was governor and is now his nearest opponent in the race, though they are both well behind Trump and Carson in most national polls, has recently positioned himself as one of the most hawkish Republicans running for President. McCain noted that Rubio, like others, had shifted into his camp after the emergence of ISIS, and he joked that Rubio has a history of switching positions, which McCain gently mocked by licking his finger and holding it in the air.

Recently, Rubio told me that he no longer believes that Obama’s drawdown was wise. “We are retreating from Afghanistan and Iraq, not anticipating the vacuum that would be left behind and the potential that creates for radicalism,” he said. His shift might seem political, but he suggested that it was the result of becoming immersed in issues, as a senator, to which, as a candidate, he had given little thought. He noted that some of his opponents, including Jeb Bush, have never held federal office. “I’m a member of the Intelligence Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee,” Rubio said. “I spend a significant amount of time working on these issues on a daily basis. So most certainly I’m going to have more insight than someone reading briefings from the staffers.”

Rubio’s foreign policy is a clear response to Obama’s alleged retreat from the world. The President’s biggest mistakes, in this view, were all failures to intervene more aggressively. Rubio has said that he would have forcefully taken the side of demonstrators in Iran during the 2009 Green Revolution. “The President was so intent on negotiating with Iran’s tyrants that he did little to help its people,” he remarked in a speech in Washington in 2011.

But the key issue for many emerging Republican hawks was Obama’s failure to attack Assad when he used chemical weapons. Obama had drawn a “red line,” but then retreated. Instead, he accepted a deal negotiated with Putin to place the weapons under international control. “Everyone heard him,” Reich said. “He said, ‘I didn’t draw the red line, the world drew a red line.’ No, Mr. President, the world didn’t stand before the cameras in the White House and say that it was drawing a red line; you did. . . . It’s very dangerous.”

George Shultz, who is ninety-four and is also a Bush adviser, was Reagan’s Secretary of State. He said that the red line was one of the biggest mistakes of Obama’s Presidency. “I don’t think the President realizes how much damage was done,” he said. “I remember when I was in marine boot camp, at the start of World War Two, and the sergeant hands me this rifle and says, ‘Take good care of this rifle—this is your best friend. Remember one thing: never point this rifle at anybody unless you’re willing to pull the trigger.’ No empty threats. That’s boot-camp wisdom. With Obama there are empty threats lying all over the place, and they undermine his credibility.”

This outlook relies on some revisionist history. When Obama asked Congress for authorization to bomb Syria in 2013, several Republicans, Rubio among them, voted against the resolution in the Foreign Relations Committee, and many others announced that they would oppose it on the Senate floor. It never came to a vote. Rubio said that the Administration’s proposed attack was not sufficiently robust; now he cites the failure to use force as the reason for much of the current chaos, including Putin’s recent involvement.

Rubio told me that years ago he warned that the power vacuums in the Middle East were being filled by Islamic extremists, and he noted ISIS’s growing role in Afghanistan, where it had previously had little presence. “If they continue unabated a year from now, we could live in a world whereISIS is now operating in vacated spaces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya,” he said. Rubio is a favorite of G.O.P. hawks. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who spent some $100 million in the 2012 election and is wooed by almost every Republican candidate, is reportedly also a fan. But Rubio sounds more cautious when asked for details about how to defeat ISIS.

“Intervening doesn’t mean ground troops,” he said. “Intervening can be a lot of things.” He went on, “A full-scale invasion, sending a hundred thousand troops to Iraq right now, is probably not the best way to defeat ISIS. Because it very well may be what they hope will happen, because it will allow them to point to radicals around the world and attract more recruits and more funding. I think that the better approach is to empower Sunni tribes to defeat them. And they need a lot of help from us, including air strikes and special-op forces.”

What Rubio laid out wasn’t very different from Obama’s current plan. When pressed, he conceded that many more American troops might be necessary. “There’s no magic number,” he said. “I don’t know if nine thousand is worse than eleven thousand. What matters is: first you have to establish a mission—what are you trying to achieve? Then you have to allow the military to come up with operations and how to achieve that mission. And that will determine the number in the mission, not the other way around.”

Rubio, Graham, and many other Republicans believe that the nation’s foreign policy suffers from timidity, not from overexertion. The problem is in the execution, not the intervention itself. “Here’s what I’ve learned,” Graham told me. “If you don’t have a plan after you take Afghanistan down, after you take Iraq down, after you take Libya down, after you take Syria down, you’re going to regret it.”

Given the failed states and the civil wars gripping Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, I asked Graham for an example of a successful intervention that would bolster his case for a more hawkish foreign policy. We were sitting outside, in Manchester, New Hampshire, and he was eating nachos. He looked at me excitedly, racing to swallow so that he could get to his answer: “How about Germany and Japan?”

Even as Bush watches his opponents solidify their foreign-policy positions, he has struggled to come to terms with his brother’s ideology. His opponents criticize him for being vague or unengaged. Graham told me, “I think he’s a work-in-progress. I think he’s been out of the game for ten years. . . . He’s gotta convince people that three Bushes are not one too many.”

Jeb Bush’s troubles began almost as soon as he declared his candidacy and included the eighty-five-year-old James Baker on his list. As Communism began to collapse, in 1989, Bush and Baker helped engineer a soft landing for the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the gradual reorientation of Europe’s Eastern Bloc countries toward the West. Hawks pilloried them for not asserting themselves strongly enough. When Bush went to Kiev, Ukraine, for instance, and warned Ukrainians not to secede from the Soviet Union, the address was mocked as the “chicken Kiev” speech. In 1991, after assembling a United Nations-backed coalition to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, Bush and Baker ignored the pleas of American neoconservatives who wanted U.S. forces to march on Baghdad and overthrow Saddam following the uprisings against his rule. They were again demonized. Wolfowitz said that it was as if America were “idly watching a mugging.” In 2006, Baker co-chaired the Iraq Study Group, which recommended a dramatic change in Bush’s policy in the Middle East, including the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from Iraq and diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria, policies that Bush rejected.

When Baker appeared on Jeb Bush’s list, neoconservatives expressed alarm. His foreign-policy views—diplomacy, stability, and serious doubts about interventions requiring large numbers of U.S. troops—are closer to Obama’s than to George W. Bush’s. Jeb Bush faced a revolt from donors and excoriation in neoconservative publications. A few weeks after Jeb’s announcement, Baker was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a Washington gala dinner for J Street, the liberal-leaning pro-Israel group founded in 2008 to act as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Commentary published an article about “Jeb Bush’s James Baker Problem” and warned that Jeb may be Baker’s “kindred spirit.” Mark Levin, an influential talk-radio host, wrote that “Jeb Bush turns to Israel-hater, Jim Baker, for foreign policy advice.” Adelson reportedly sent word to Bush that he should pressure Baker to cancel the speech. Bush declined, and Adelson’s allies leaked that Adelson wouldn’t support Bush.

At the J Street dinner, Baker criticized Benjamin Netanyahu for “diplomatic missteps and political gamesmanship,” and spoke about his own role in the first Bush Administration’s withholding of loan guarantees to Israel in order to pressure the government to halt settlement construction. William Kristol, the editor of TheWeekly Standard, called Baker “anti-Israel,” and tweeted, “Thankfully, James Baker doesn’t speak for today’s Republican Party.” Morton Klein, the president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, told Bloomberg that Bush’s association with Baker would cost the candidate: “There are many mega-donors who will not be with him because of that.”

In May, Bush appeared in New York, at the Metropolitan Club, before an audience of financiers organized by Paul Singer, a hedge-fund manager and the kind of Republican mega-donor Klein had warned about. Someone asked Bush to explain Baker’s influence on his policymaking. According to the Washington Post, Jeb “said that he respected Baker, but maintained that he is not part of his foreign-policy team.” CNN, which cited four sources and the notes of someone present, quotes Bush as saying, “What you need to know is that who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush.” The Bush campaign later insisted that Jeb was speaking narrowly about Israeli policy. Either way, the message was clear: the hawks were back in control of Republican foreign policy.

Lately, in his effort to be his “own man,” Bush has displayed a willingness to move even further to the right than his brother. At the October 2nd interview in South Carolina, Wilson asked him about the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. During George W. Bush’s tenure, the prison became such a source of shame for America that even Bush, who was loath to acknowledge mistakes or to bow to international pressure, said in 2007, “It should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantánamo.” Jeb disagrees. Wilson asked if Guantánamo prisoners should be moved to maximum-security facilities in the U.S. “No,” Jeb said. “There is no option for these folks. They should stay where they are. Even if it’s—it’s expensive. It’s the nicest prison you’ll ever want to be in, by the way. And the rights of these terrorists are way beyond what a lot of people get in a lot of different circumstances. They’re not being mistreated at all. But there is no other option.”

If the economy improves, and Democrats continue to maintain an advantage on domestic issues, the Republican candidates will increasingly highlight foreign policy, an area of perceived vulnerability for Obama and Clinton. McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008, said, perhaps hopefully, “National security, foreign policy, and terrorism will play a greater role in the decision-making of the American people than at any time since 1980.” He insisted that although Bush’s record on foreign policy contributed to his own defeat, “it has gone from a significant negative” at the start of the Obama Administration “to what has become more and more of a positive.”

In August, Bush travelled to Simi Valley, California, to give a speech on foreign policy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Bush called Reagan “a leader of clarity and resolve, not given to idle words,” someone “who took command of events, rebuilt America’s strength, and moved the world toward peace.” But when he shifted from Reagan’s Cold War successes to more recent events his speech sounded more like a tribute to the Administration of George W. Bush.

“No leader or policymaker involved will claim to have gotten everything right in the region, Iraq especially,” he said. But he argued that, whatever mistakes were made, it was the surge of troops in 2007 that “turned events toward victory.” The surge “was a success—brilliant, heroic, and costly.” It was Obama who lost Iraq, not his brother. The “premature withdrawal was the fatal error,” Jeb said, referring to Obama’s gradual drawdown, “creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill—and that Iran has exploited to the full as well.”

He then turned this logic against the Democrats’ most likely nominee. “ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat,” he said. “And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the President himself, she had opposed the surge, then joined in claiming credit for its success, then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away. In all her record-setting travels, she stopped by Iraq exactly one time.”

Clinton herself has tried to create some distance from Obama’s record. Since leaving the Administration, she has repeatedly said that as Secretary of State she urged Obama to do more in the early days of the Syrian uprising against Assad, when moderates could still be found in that country and American intervention could, arguably, have made a difference. Obama has dismissed that view as “a fantasy.” But, whatever Clinton actually believes about the correct course in the Middle East, she has already shown that she will adopt the campaign position that best suits her politically. In early October, facing a challenge from the left from Bernie Sanders, she reversed her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that she championed as Secretary of State.

It’s easy to attack Obama as feckless in the face of the chaos in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. Less apparent is how to translate vague campaign promises to do something into a plan that won’t put more American lives at risk. After Jeb Bush spoke with Wilson in South Carolina, he met with reporters backstage. His aides were scrambling to contain any fallout from the “stuff happens” remark, which had immediately elicited a response from President Obama, and echoed one of the most notorious statements of the Bush Administration: Rumsfeld’s declaration during the chaos in Iraq that “stuff happens.” After defending his remark, Jeb Bush then took some questions about Syria, Iraq, and Putin.

He has called for a no-fly zone over Syria that would help a Sunni-led army fight a two-front war against Assad and ISIS, but it’s unclear who would make up the forces. He told reporters that American airpower in Syria is “restricted by lawyers kind of imposing all sorts of conditions.” He would change the rules, he said, so “that it would be there to fight to win.” He didn’t specify which rules he would lift, but, as Graham noted, almost every military expert dismisses the idea that airpower alone can defeat ISIS. “The only way you destroy a big ground opponent is with another big ground opponent,” Graham told me. “You’re not going to bomb ISIL into submission. You gotta go tear the caliphate up by the roots. That means going into Syria on the ground.”

To fight ISIS in Iraq, Bush made the familiar argument that America should arm the Kurds and “embed with the Iraqi military,” both of which Obama is effectively doing. When asked whether he would send more troops, Bush said that the U.S. already has thirty-five hundred troops in Iraq and that the real issue was how to better integrate them into Iraqi forces. Pressed further, he conceded, in a roundabout way, that he would be willing to send more American troops back to Iraq.

“I would listen to the military commanders and I would create a strategy,” he said, a phrase that politicians revert to whenever they want to avoid details. “If it required more supportive troops, fine.” The statement was a reminder of Bush’s continuing dilemma: can he get the nomination without violating his principles? In the months since the start of his campaign, he has only clouded the matter of what, precisely, he stands for.

At one point, someone asked Bush a churlish question about his father’s 1991 statement regarding the possibility of “a new world order” after the Cold War ended. Bush used it as an opportunity to talk about Obama’s alleged retreat from the world.

“I don’t even know what that means anymore,” he said. “In 1992, it meant the end of Communism, and that the United States needed to play a constructive role in forging peace and security, and we still have that role to play. We have threats that are created by our absence. Just look at what’s going on in Syria as an example of that, where we have no strategy, where Putin, agile as he is, ends up injecting himself into something that makes it harder for me to imagine that this brutal Assad regime will depart.” He thought for a moment and added, “American leadership matters.” ♦

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.